The Good, the Bad and the Busy

Although I am currently in the thick of wading my way through this heavy BRS Anatomy book I figure that if I don't write a post now, then I'll never get around to writing one.

The 2012 Fall Semester has come and I'm glad to have finally paid off, to the university, the last of my tuition fees. Of course, I still owe Uncle Sam and plenty of my relatives tens of thousands of dollars with interest accruing. At least I won't have to worry about any other huge bills (the size of $13,411) for a long long time. Perhaps not until I retire and break even.

When paying off my tuition I used as much from my credit cards to build my credit, however a strange thing happened to my Bank of America online banking account on Friday. I tried to log in and instead of directing me to my account it gave me an error saying "There are no open accounts for this Online ID. We are unable to service your request. If you need further assistance you can call xyz.xyz.wxyz." So I called up Bank of America and they said that my account is currently... under investigation! I haven't made any suspicious purchases so I have little idea as to why my account has been shut down. They didn't even send me an email or call me to let me know that my account and credit card are unable to be used. This is one more reason why I dislike our increasingly automated and impersonal business and consumer climate. And to think that our tax dollars were used to bail these guys out (to put it lightly). My only guess is that one of the merchants that I used with amazon.com was compromised and they had to delete all of the credit card numbers that ever went to that merchant. The operator from Bank of America (had a foreign accent) said that the investigative department is closed on the weekend so I'll have to wait until Monday to call them. Crime never rests, but apparently the people at Bank of America are on top of things and can afford to take the weekends off.

A pathologist's assistant will spend most of their time grossing while either standing or sitting. I tend to sit as much as possible to prevent the development of varicose veins, but Forbes has an interesting article about none other than the lethal dangers of sitting.
How to Stop Your Office Chair from Killing You
http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2012/06/12/how-to-stop-your-office-chair-from-killing-you/
It turns out that sitting isn't the best activity for our bipedal, walk-a-lot, evolved neanderthal bodies. Outside of work and studying I try to jog when I can. Recently my mp3 player, purchased in antiquity, had died on me and jogging without a song to listen to made me retract into laziness. I had an even older mp3 player back at home in California and I asked my brother to send it to me.

Upon coming home one day I looked in the mail to see a package from amazon. (Unrelated to the credit card issue above.) It was strange because I hadn't ordered anything on amazon and I wasn't expecting a package from them. Yet, the package surely enough had my name listed, so it must have been for myself. I open the package and lo-and-behold:

a brand new 4th generation iPod Touch.
I was shocked and moved all at once. What had happened was that my younger brother had purchased this for me with his hard earned, new-found money from his nursing job. I never would have thought that he'd gift me with this. I'm such a penny-pincher that I wouldn't have even bought this for myself if I could have afforded it. It has been difficult concentrating on textbooks with this still unexplored device in the palm of my hands, but I'm very grateful to have such a thoughtful and generous younger brother. Now I've got to find a way to make it up to him.

Over this past year and a half there have been a lot of people who have been asking me some very good questions via email regarding the field of PA and the program at West Virginia University. In my next post I hope to list some of the more common questions and answer them to the best of my ability.


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Update: 8/20/2012

Well, I was able to get into contact with Bank of America and it turns out that when I made a call to them through SKYPE earlier in the week it triggered their computer system to flag my account for suspicious activity. Because the SKYPE # was not listed in Bank of America's computers, they may have thought that it was a scammer or thief. I explained to them that I had indeed made the call through SKYPE earlier in the week and my account with Bank of America should thankfully be up and back to normal soon.